Literary Birthday – 5 January – Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons was born 5 January 1902, and died 19 December 1989

Nine Quotes

Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress.

One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.

A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious.

There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

She had kept her brain exercised by reading heavyish books, which might not always be truly wise but at least were not those meringues of the intellect, those mental brandies-and-sodas – novels.

The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘collecting material’. No one can object to that.

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

Stella Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet. She published more than 20 novels, including her first book, Cold Comfort Farm, which won the literary Prix Femina Étranger. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950.